A History of Gaming in Nine Influential Genres

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Genres that shaped the industry through the ages.

By Dave McCarthy

There's some debate over what, exactly, constituted the first videogame and who created it. However, Nolan Bushnell's Spacewar! clone, Computer Space, undeniably sparked a sequence of events that ushered in the golden age of arcade gaming. Starting with Pong, these early technological pioneers were playing without rules, producing an enormously diverse burst of creativity, ranging widely across titles such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Defender, and Asteroids. However, it was a game starring a plumber and a gorilla that kick-started the fad mentality of gaming, establishing the first of many genres to inspire both audiences and money men alike. Here, we present the genres that helped evolve the industry from humble 8-bit beginnings to the multimillion dollar entertainment behemoth it is today.

Platform Gaming Plateaus

Partly spurred on by the Sega/Nintendo-inspired advent of home consoles in the early '80s, the arrival of the platform game added greater variety to the single-screen or simple scrolling shooters of the arcade era. Donkey Kong might have been the first, or maybe it was Pitfall!, but either way, the ideas encapsulated in each reached their culmination in the shape of Super Mario Bros., which sold over 40 million copies after its release in 1985. Five or six years later, the genre was still going strong, a fact amply demonstrated by the showdown between Super Mario World and Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog. And later still the genre underwent a resurgence with the arrival of 3D technology, which made games like Mario 64 and Tomb Raider possible in the mid-'90s.

A New Challenger: The Beat-'em-Up

With such a long lifespan, it's perhaps no surprise that the platforming game wasn't the only contender for the dominant genre of the mid- to late-'80s. The beat 'em up appeared slightly later than the earliest platform games, but for many years the two co-existed. Early scrolling beat 'em ups, like Kung Fu Master (1984) and Altered Beast (1988) even bore some resemblance to platforming games, with punching and kicking taking the place of jumping and leaping, and they reached their pinnacle at the end of the '80s with Double Dragon, Final Fight, and Streets of Rage.

But in 1991 a new era of fighting games kicked off with the arrival of a new contender: Street Fighter II. Still one of the best beat 'em ups ever, it introduced the concept of combos and inspired Midway's Mortal Kombat a year later (which, in turn, sparked one of the medium's early moral panics, culminating in US Senate hearings about videogame violence). The beat 'em up was so successful, in fact, that for several generations, no home console could launch without one: the Saturn had Virtua Fighter; PlayStation had Battle Arena Toshinden (and, later, Tekken); Dreamcast had Soul Calibur; and the PlayStation 2 got Street Fighter EX3. Even Xbox got in on the act with Dead or Alive 3 (although the less said about Kabuki Warriors and Kakuto Chojin, the better). And though the genre is no longer number one, games like Soul Calibur IV demonstrate that its soul still burns.

The First Age of the First-Person Shooter

In some respects, the dominance of platform games and beat 'em ups was a measure of the dominance of arcade coin-ops and home consoles. The arrival of Doom, in 1993, however, marked the arrival of the PC as a gaming platform. Everybody knows, now, that Doom didn't invent the first-person shooter. It merely popularised it. But boy did it popularise it, taking over workplaces across the world with its LAN deathmatches, and spawning a flood of imitators that occupied gamers up until the start of the next century. Duke Nukem 3D and Quake were among the better ones, before GoldenEye rewrote the rules of the genre for home consoles and Medal of Honor took it down the road of historical accuracy. Other notable developments include Half-Life's breathtakingly atmospheric narrative and Deus Ex's open-ended, systemic design, which took the first person shooter ever further away from its original source material. It's a genre that's so popular that it's never really gone away – but more on that later.

The Rise of the RTS

For now, let's turn to Command & Conquer and realtime strategy – the other pillar on which the mid-'90s rise of PC gaming was built. Like Doom it didn't invent the genre (Dune II did, sort of). Heck, it wasn't even the best realtime strategy game around at the time – Warcraft II was, by a considerable margin. But it was the game that firmly established the RTS, and it continued to do so through several sequels, leaving a succession of similar titles in its tank-rushing wake. Indeed it felt like every PC game released in the late '90s was – if it wasn't an FPS – some sort of RTS, though very few managed to substantially improve on the Command & Conquer and Warcraft franchises (one notable exception that actually did was Starcraft). Only recently has there been renaissance in RTS gaming, with the likes of Dawn of War and Company of Heroes striving to strike out into new directions.